Beginning of New Bond

Google Home

I was quite excited to try out Google Home, although none of my light switches at home is smart enough to pair up with it.

The commands I have used most are:

Weather today/tomorrow/next week
Play a podcast (only autoplays the latest episode)
Play XX radio station
Play a XX song by XX artist

Phrasing the commands simple and straightforward is the rule, otherwise what awaits me is just “Sorry I can’t help.” or “Sorry I don’t understand”.

It certainly has created a new vibe at home, but I also sometimes wonder whether it is actually necessary to have such a not-so-smart “home assistant” to be around.

Google, not surprisingly, is pretty proud of its product:

What we found is that people are not only learning how to use the devices, they’re weaving them into their lives and daily routines. And in some instances, they’re forging a new kind of bond with technology, one that’s often much more personal than in the past.

I was expecting the bond to be formed a bit more smoothly than what I’m experiencing. The media had given a lot of credibility to the AI technology and what it can bring to the future, despite its obvious current limitations. It feels that AI has slowly taken its shape in certain fields through audio and visual stimulation, or maybe a combination of both. However, since long ago, the discussions of AI tend to focus on how AI can saturate ordinary people’s life both physically and mentally  — ie: occupations to be replaced by AI roborts by 20XX years; AI computer beats chess master; people become too obsessed with AI and get confused with boundaries between AI and reality (as seen in the movie Her, and Black Mirror S3E1).

The “new bond” pushed by Google signifies that they have kickstarted the process to transit a machine from one that talks, responds, and actions, to one that understands, interacts, and generates more intimate user experience.

Recently Facebook has decided to shift its Newsfeed algorithm from focusing on relevant content to enabling more “meaningful social interactions.”Another example that big companies are heavily investing in new ways of getting people to “bond” with technology, on a level that facilitates the day-to-day social interactions between people in an online environment.

As AI becoming part of the modern living, it will certainly introduce new user habits, access points, behaviours, which then lead to more diverse ways to perceive ourselves and others. However it’d be interesting to see if the “new bond” led by AI will live up to the high expectation, both in terms of its speed of development and the quality of the connection that’s being generated.